March 12, 2009, Wayland, Mass. - The membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is requesting comments from the public on the candidate OGC Document, "The OGC Specification Model - Writing Modular Specifications".

This document, prepared by the Policy 1.0 Standards Working Group, derives from the collective experience of members in developing and implementing OGC standards, geospatial applications, platforms and services. It provides a logical model and template for candidate standards to assure their internal logic and conformance to accepted software development procedures and the OGC's policy and rules regarding the structure of standards and the types of information that they must provide. The policy guidance will make implementation of OGC standards and the construction of compliance tests easier through enforced traceability of requirements to implementation tests, and it will make modularization of both standards and implementations more explicit and consistent across dependent standards and implementations.

This standard has been referred to as the "core and extension model" due to the insistence on a modular structure throughout all parts of a standard and its implementation. Eventually, all OGC standards will be transitioned to the new structure. This will help standardize the manner in which OGC standards are written and implemented, making implementations easier to test for compliance, thus improving interoperability between and swap-ability between implementations.

The 30 day public comment period begins March 12, 2009 and closes on April 11, 2009. Comments will be reviewed and processed by the OGC Membership. The intent is to edit the Specification Model candidate standard and move the document to be an approved OGC standard. The Specification Model Request for Comment document can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/55.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 370 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.